In late March, the Muslim protestor group known as the Izz Al-Din al-QassamCyber Fighters hacked into the systems of several United States financial institutions including American Express and Wells Fargo. No money was stolen, transferred or interfered with in any way. So what was the motivation behind the attack? We can get a big clue from the man they named themselves for. He was their inspiration behind the attack and was a Syrian Muslim Imam preaching jihad against infidels. He was killed in 1935 in an attack against the British. He was the inspiration for Hamas terrorist leader, Yasser Arafat. Read the rest of this entry »

The principle fear when discussing hackers and bank accounts involves unauthorized transfers and electronic “robbery”. Recently, there have been a large number of cyber-attacks on U.S. banks. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PNC Financial Services and more have indicated that there have been concerted attacks against their websites that either crash or slow the system down to a crawl, making bank customer access to their accounts difficult, if not impossible. So far, there have been no thefts of funds as a result of these attacks detected. The main result so far of these attacks center around customers who were not able to pay bills or access their accounts during the attack. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week the Twitter account of the Associated Press was hacked, apparently for the sole purpose of sending out false messages to AP’s followers. The group responsible for the attack is known as the Syrian Electronic Army, which is a group of Syrians who are fiercely loyal to the President of Syria. This group uses these tactics to send orchestrated attacks against news agencies that they feel portray their President in a negative manner. The false message they tweeted regarded an attack at the White House in which President Obama was injured in an explosion. The brief panic that ensued was felt as far away as the New York Stock Exchange where stocks took a sharp dive, only to recover later when the tweet was confirmed as false. Read the rest of this entry »

Most internet users do not have any awareness of the switches and routers which are scattered all over their networks and play the role of the silent knights by doing their work without causing any interruptions or problems for the users. These routers are on the verge of getting a much needed makeover due to Software Defined Networking (SDN). With the help of the SDN, routers will no longer have to bear the brunt of being called just pieces of hardware but will become components of a very powerful and extremely proactive network.

One of the main changes that was very much required was the need for a configuration which could easily alter in order to fit any given size. This became imperative as in today’s digital world, there are various kinds of online traffic and thus, the one size which fits all no longer works. Read the rest of this entry »

The distinguished security corporation, McAfee, lately released a 2013 Threat Predictions report, via the McAfee Laboratory division. The information therein proposed a couple of patterns in the sector for 2013 that will include diminished activity that will see groups like Anonymous appear less in the reports. There will however be increased attacks in cyberspace especially concerning politics and military buoyed by sophistication tools in the sector.

Mobile phone technology has grown into complicated devices as they take on more functions and with this growth, it is only expected that mobile malware usage in tablets and smartphones will also go up. As more people use iPads and smartphones to access the internet so does the hacking attempts increase targeting specifically these devices and their users. Read the rest of this entry »

In the world, there are far too many unnecessary competitions and the latest one has seen India overtake the US to take the number one spot of contribution to global spam, which amounts to sixteen percent of the world’s total according to giant IBM.

As the internet grew and is growing today email spam has been identified as the single most unrelenting challenge for online security. This report therefore implies that India with the increasing usage of internet in the country is seeing a rising number of spam email production. There has been a twenty five percent increase in web usage in India, which has both positive and negative connotations simultaneously such as the increase of market for advertisers and cyber criminals respectively. Read the rest of this entry »